Shi Jing, The Book of Odes: Minor Odes of the Kingdom, Decade of Xiao Min

[x_los]

 * I found the best option for the weekly reminder emails, via Gmail. The external service options are more involved than our purposes require. Does anyone know anything about how to arrange an Apps Script? Basically all it has to do is tell ten people, on Saturdays, to come and get their juice/poems.

Until someone knows what to do there, I'll send out manual messages weekly. If you'd like to receive these and are not getting them, please let me know.

* If you haven't read it yet, chapter one, on tetrasyllabic shi poetry, in How to Read Chinese Poetry is hugely useful for the Book of Odes, imo.

* IF YOU HAVE FRIENDS WHO MIGHT LIKE TO JOIN or have other ideas, please let me know on this post.

* Every week I search the poems' English results to see if I can find any scholarship or neat bits and pop the results in Resources. Here is this week's collection.

**NEXT BATCH APRIL 26.**

Comments

Re: 203. 大东 - Da Dong

[x_los]

"Well loaded with millet were the dishes,
And long and curved were spoons of thorn-wood.
The way to Zhou was like a whetstone,
And straight as an arrow."

what's this xing doing, and then the following couplet?

"The sons of the poorest families,
Form the officers in public employment." ?


"If we present them with spirits,
They do not look on them as liquor.
If we give them long girdle-pendants with their stones,
They do not think them long enough.
There is the milky way in heaven,
Which looks down on us in light;
And the three stars together are the Weaving Sisters,
Passing in a day through seven stages [of the sky]." ??

Stars in constellations don't do the work of the figures they represent and the poet is salty about it

What's the last stanza doing?

Re: 203. 大东 - Da Dong

[superborb]

The poorest families bit is the narrator contrasting the socio-economic and political status of the Zhou people and those they conquered.

Baike's commentary on the last stanza says something about how even the "sky" was serving the Zhou dynasty to squeeze the Eastern people.

Baike says nothing useful about the first stanza though. My interpretation is that even though the food is there, it's all going to the Zhou people (via this nice flat road)?